Background
Voegelin, Eric Herman Wilhelm was born on January 3, 1901 in Cologne, Germany.
political philosopher Philosopher of history
Voegelin, Eric Herman Wilhelm was born on January 3, 1901 in Cologne, Germany.
University of Vienna.
1923-1938, Assistant, Privatdozent (1928), then Associate Professor (1929), Law Faculty, University of Vienna. 1943-1958, Associate Professor, Professor (1946), then Boyd Professor ( 1952) of Government, Louisiana State University. 1958-1969, Professor of Political Science, University of Munich.
1969-1985, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford.
Forced out of his post at Vienna after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1936, Voegelin fled to Switzerland and then emigrated to the USA in 1938. His researches, unbound by disciplinary conventions, extended to political science, comparative religions, history, archaeology, ethnology, law, literary criticism and philosophy. He devoted his life’s work to an analysis of the nature and sources of order and disorder in human existence. His search for understanding unfolded in a long series of writings, including his monumental Order and History (1956-1988), which reflected his antipathy to the claims of ideological fanaticism. Voegelin sought the 'true being' of man and society through a comprehensive philosophy of human existence which would transcend what he called the 'immancntist’ limits of modern thought. His philosophy aimed to renew both man’s sense of his rootedness in historical process and his awareness of his ‘openness’ towards the transcendent reality of ‘God’. Voegelin is considered by some to be one of the most penetrating and challenging political philosophers of our century. His writings became particularly popular among the dissidents of Central Europe in the decades preceding the collapse of Communism.